Does animacy feature facilitate lexical-semantic processing in first-episode psychosis?

Background It is widely assumed that lexical-semantic deficits in first-episode psychosis occur as a syndrome of a dysfunctional neural connectivity and global functional changes in brain regions that are crucial for language processing because of a broadly distributed network disorder.

Purpose The aim of this study was to investigate deficits of mental lexicon access in psychosis. Furthermore, the question that has arisen is the role of lexical-semantic features of animacy in lexical-semantic processing in regard to executive functions. Concepts that share the animacy feature also suppose more correlated intercategory features. On the other hand, inanimate concepts have more distinctive features. Furthermore, the correlation of intercategory features increases the automation of connections in the mental lexicon and presupposes activation of a higher number of clusters.

Method Specific aspects of lexical-semantic processing were tested in The University Psychiatric Hospital Vrapče on 30 patients with diagnosed first-episode psychosis who were matched with a control group consisting of 30 healthy participants.Analysis confirmed that there are differences in clustering and switching strategies between the patients and the control group.

Results The results of this study have demonstrated that patients have fewer automated links in all tested lexical-semantic categories, but the animate category features are shown to be most preserved. On account of these results we can assume that different lexical-semantic categories produce a neural noise of different intensity.

Conclusions The contribution of this study is in line with determining language classifiers which could help in additional diagnosing of the acute disorder and could potentially enable the prediction of the course of the disorder and its functional outcome.